5 HA-P-PY

Learning how to read has been easier than I expected. The alphabet here has ten letters which indicate sound like "A" or "O" and five letters which indicate sounds like "R" or "K". Those letters can be made into characters which can make up words like putting together "HA" "P" and "PY" makes up the word happy. There is more than 100 characters like those and some of them are even their own words. It took me about half a year to remember all of the letters and after a year and a half I was able to completely memorize the most important characters. Now I can read basically every book I get my hands on. I even got a story book for my first birthday. I was a little worried when I got it, because books are expensive, but I heard that grandma and her son gave my mother a discount when she bought the book. Aparendly seeing a one-year-old read a book made more people interested in reading and they had gotten more books sold even to commoners like us and not only nobles.

My mother still goes to the market daily and takes me with her. She of course leaves me at grandmas care so I can continue reading. Grandmas eyesight has gotten bad so she leaves me to read by myself now. She says that she enjoys hearing me read and is happy when I come and visit her. I really like being with grandma too, but I am scared that she won't be here for that much longer… Then I'll just have to be happy as long as she's here! Reading story books ended for me when grandma stopped reading. I wanted to learn about the world around me and to do that I had to read actual books about science. I read books about biology, I read books about math, I even read medical books until grandma found out and took those from me. I understand why she did that. Those books reminded me of a scary word. It's a word no one likes and a word that everyone is scared of. Death… The disappearance of someone. "After you die no one will remember you!"

I wonder who said that... Death is the one thing I don't really want to learn about. Mostly it's because that would lead me to religion and I don't care for that, but also because I'm scared. No one wants to die. That is something that will always be true no matter where you are. Religion I don't really have a problem with. Here you become a part of a religion ones you are at the age of five. That's because many children die at a very young age and so they can't really be considered "Humans" here. It is sad, because you can't let them go to the "Other world" as they say, like you can do with probably in the religion. Also you can't bury them. Those are the rules and we live by them even if it is sad.